Snitch World (9 page)

A block away, at Gino & Carlo, on Green Street, Phillip switched to margaritas. Miles Davis was on the jukebox. The bar was crowded, convivial, boisterous. Phillip almost felt at home. He ordered a second margarita. It tasted good, it made him feel better, it made no difference that the room was spinning. A solid year of stress began to shed down his shoulders like rain off a dog, therefrom to flood across the barroom floor and dissipate through the cracks into who knew how deep a karmic basement, not like rats leaving a sinking ship, he smiled to think, but like parasites deserting a host they’d bled dry. This feels great, Phillip said to himself. He even repeated it out loud, apropos of nothing, to a guy sitting next to him. You got that right, said the guy to Phillip, barely audible though other people’s yelling, and they touched glasses.

Not long after that Phillip had the idea of going down to Enrico’s, where he hadn’t been in a long time, because they served food there very late, and he had a vague idea it was good food and, after that misfired Italian meal, he found himself hungry enough to try again. For sure he remembered the custom mix of local olives served in oil from the Napa Valley with fresh-baked bread he could order there, not to mention a good glass of wine, and, muttering an adios to his stool mate, Phillip sallied into the night.

Across Green Street, two men lounged in the doorway of a darkened store specializing in used vinyl, used stereo equipment, and used musical instruments.

“Here he comes,” one said to the other.

An hour and a half later the mark came out of the Chat Noir on the south side of Broadway, directly across the street from Enrico’s. He faced east, paused, faced west, paused, then exhaled loudly.

The sidewalk was teeming, the neon was screaming.

Whoooee, Phillip Wong was thinking. I may be six foot three, but those two Rusty Nails got me nailed to a tree.

The rhyme caught his fancy, and he began to repeat it under his breath. Six foot three, nailed to a tree. Six foot three …

Klinger, moving east, went port-to-port with the mark, nudging the left shoulder with his own left shoulder. “Oh, excuse me, buddy,” Klinger said, turning to his right. The mark, who had been turned maybe forty-five degrees, barely noticed. “No problem,” he said, just as Frankie Geeze went starboard to starboard with him.

“Oh, hey, hey, watch where you’re goin’,” Frankie said cheerfully. He took a step forward as he spoke, then turned a quarter turn back. “You okay, fella?”

Phillip Wong turned to his right and, being as he was about fifteen minutes from taking a nap in the gutter, straightened up, smoothed the front of his jacket and, marshaling all the dignity he had left, had a look at both of his fellow pedestrians and said, “I’m just fine, thank you. Dandy all ‘round. No problem. No problem. Six foot three.” He cleared his throat. “Always a silver lining,” he said thoughtfully. The prospect of eight or ten hours’ sleep,
uninterrupted by cache overflows and rude phone calls, looked pretty good to him.

“Glad to hear it.”

“Me, too, fella,” Klinger said, moving east. “Have a swell night.”

“Say,” Frankie Geeze said, as Phillip Wong turned to his left to watch Klinger fade toward the intersection at Kearny, “can you tell me where the Ferry Building is?”

Phillip Wong turned back to his right. “The Ferry Building?” He frowned. “The Ferry Building …”

“That’s okay,” Frankie told him. “I’ll find the mother-fucker. You—.”

Phillip pointed west, toward the Broadway Tunnel, then lifted his hand, still pointing, over Frankie’s head, and swung it back down Broadway until it was pointed east. Then, turning with the hand, he pointed more or less southeast. “Down to the bottom of Broadway, across the Embarcadero, take a right. You’ll be on the water. Right away, you come to Pier 7. Can’t miss it. It’s a so-called fishing pier, though there’s no more fish, and it’s all lit up. Like me.” Phillip chuckled. He converted the more or less horizontal pointing finger into the vertical one of pedagogy. “North of the Ferry Building,” he informed Frankie, who listened patiently, “the piers are all odd-numbered. South of the Ferry Building …” Phillip’s voice trailed off.

“They’re even,” Frankie helpfully supplied.

“That’s it,” Phillip said, staggering a little. “Too late for more ferries, though,” he lamented.

“That’s okay,” Frankie said. “I’m supposed to meet a chick in a bar down there. How far is that?” Frankie shot a pinstriped cuff and had a look at a nice watch whose face lay on the inside of his wrist. “Damn.”

Phillip screwed up his face. “That’s gotta be half a mile.” He pulled forward the left lapel of his British tweed jacket
with his left hand and reached for the inside pocket with his right. “I could ask my phone—.”

“Not to worry, pal,” Frankie said mildly, touching the mark’s wrist. “I got half an hour.”

“Oh,” Philip said, dropping the lapel. “You’ll make the date. Easy.”

“Yeah,” Frankie told him. “Time to enjoy the full moon.”

Phillip turned east again. There, not a hand’s breadth above Berkeley, hung a huge moon, full and very orange.

“It must have just risen,” Phillip marveled. “Wow.”

“If it’s setting over there,” Frankie suggested, “we’re in a world of shit.”

For the second time in less than a minute, Phillip managed a chuckle.

“Gotta go,” Frankie told him, and he went.

Phillip, watching the moon, nodded distantly.

Two-thirds of the Broadway block beyond Kearny, Frankie passed Klinger, who was ambling along with his hands in his pockets, and took a right at Montgomery. A couple of minutes later, just below the entrance to the parking lot at Verdi Place, Klinger caught up with him. “So?”

Frankie showed a thickness of freshly laundered twenties, folded once across the middle.

“A horizontal jeans pocket, and under the hem of a jacket too,” Klinger marveled. “A clean piece of work.”

“I was afraid I’d lost my touch inna joint,” Frankie said simply.

“No way,” Klinger assured him. “If I had a GED certificate, I’d sign it over to ya.”

“But to tell you the truth,” Frankie continued modestly, “that guy gave me so much time I coulda took his shorts off him. He never woulda noticed the difference.” Frankie opened the folded bills and slid the thickness of the stack
between thumb and forefinger. “Take,” he said, giving, and “Count,” he added, without bothering to do so himself.

Despite the dim light Klinger counted five twenties, a ten, four ones, and said as much. “One fourteen.”

“Fifty-fifty.” Frankie slipped his half of the take into the breast pocket of his jacket and patted it. Then he patted the breast pocket into which Klinger had deposited his own cut. “Thanks. And now we part ways.”

Klinger frowned. “That enough for you?”

“Sure.” Frankie smiled. “Who needs to eat?”

The roar crescendoed into a howl more to be expected from a man desperate to wake from a bad dream than from a mere victim whose pocket has been picked. Before either felon could react, Phillip plowed into them from behind, launching Frankie headlong down the steepness of Montgomery. As Phillip ricocheted into Klinger, he tackled him at the waist.

Klinger, though a slacker when it came to physical altercation, did what he thought he had to do, which was bring both fists, one clasped inside the other, down onto the back of Phillip’s neck. To little discernible effect. On the contrary, having hurtled down the hill, aided and accelerated by gravity, Phillip’s forward momentum, though shared with Frankie, pinballed the two of them across the breadth of the sidewalk.

A peculiarity of this sidewalk is that it forms the eastern border of a two-level parking garage. The top level is accessed from Broadway. Access to the lower floor, ten feet below the upper, is made via Verdi Place, off Montgomery Street.

The upper deck, of poured pre-stressed concrete, being more or less flush with the elevation of Broadway, flies south over the Verdi entrance until it’s a full story and a half higher than Montgomery Street. The upper deck is
supported by a fourteen-inch grade beam. Between the apex of this beam, where it meets the pavement of Verdi, and the end of the parking lot, perhaps five car-widths south, a long, right-angle triangle opens up. Its upper leg is level, and it extends from the apex at Verdi to the northernmost exterior wall of the next building south. This wall forms a right angle with the upper car deck, and descends about eight feet to the incline of the Montgomery sidewalk. This sidewalk, if you walk back up the hill, north, forms the hypotenuse of the right triangle, tapering through the angle back to the foundation of the Verdi pavement.

This entire triangle is open. Once upon a time, perhaps, there had been fencing over this cavity, or pigeon netting, or a handrail. But no longer.

It was through this opening that Phillip Wong’s forward moment carried Klinger, despite Klinger’s frantic, if momentary, resistance. But, in fact, if Klinger had been able to foresee the end result, he might have resisted not at all. Precipitated backward, Klinger also twisted and fell to his right, down the hill, and, as he was shot almost horizontally through the aperture, like a perfectly cued eight ball, not so much as grazing above or below, the upper deck’s grade beam peeled Phillip Wong off Klinger’s hip as if he were a spud and his aggressor its epidermis, fracturing the skull of the victim—for Phillip Wong remains the victim in this, does he not?—though not killing him outright, and depriving him of his consciousness.

Klinger, for his part, fell several feet onto the hood of a brand new Jaguar XKR, indenting the cobalt blue sheet metal considerably, rolled half over and fell again, to the concrete between cars. The former impact sent a formidable boom reverberating among the parked vehicles, whose echoes eclipsed the grunt evinced by the latter.

This isn’t working out, Klinger said to himself, as he
rolled over onto his back, but you got to get up anyway. He clawed at the Jaguar tire in the darkness. You got to get up! How come this car’s alarm didn’t go off? Get up …

Squinting in the dark, he heard a groan.

“Frankie,” he whispered.

Klinger pulled himself up by the Jaguar’s bumper, then by its eponymous hood ornament. The lower ledge of the opening was too high for him to see over. He moved south along the angle of the sidewalk until he could see over it. There, across the sidewalk and face down in a treebox, he could discern the crumbled outline of his erstwhile partner, Frankie Geeze.

Frankie looked a lot like a pile of laundry.

Klinger stuck his head out, over the hypotenuse of the sidewalk, and looked up the hill. There he discerned another pile of laundry, and from it the groan repeated.

Though this was North Beach, the street was dark and there seemed to be nobody around. “Frankie,” Klinger hissed. He got one foot onto the front bumper of a Jeep Cherokee and levered a third of himself through the angled opening. “Frankie!”

Scrabbling for a purchase by which to lever himself through the hole, Klinger’s uphill hand, his left, came wet away from the sidewalk. This gave him pause. By the miserable illumination available, his hand glistened black. He looked left. A gleaming trail led up the hill to the second pile of laundry.

Somebody dies in the commission of a felony, no matter how, it’s called aggravating circumstances. It doesn’t matter who dies, either. It could be a victim, it could be a bystander, it could be a perpetrator, it doesn’t matter. The devil-djinn of gotcha squirm snapped one talon off the pastern of another: an accomplice gets the death house.

Klinger sagged against the concrete. Shit, he said to
himself. What started out as a bit of wage-earning has become gravid with seriousness.

And before he could assemble a more coherent synapse, blue and red lights and two or three registers of sirens converged on both ends of the block.

Both feet on the front bumper of the Jeep, Klinger reversed himself into a crouch so that now his back was against the outside wall of the parking garage, with his head below the angle of the sidewalk above.

Frankie’s got a lot to lose with this one, Klinger told himself, but the one thing he won’t do is dime me. Still … He reversed himself again and stuck his head up sufficient to catch a glimpse of the closer pile of laundry, just across the sidewalk. “Frankie,” he hissed. “Get up!”

Headlights swiveled through the upper branches of the tree against whose trunk Frankie lay crumpled, as a fire truck turned south off Broadway and down Montgomery, not 150 feet up the hill. “Frankie,” Klinger implored. “Make a move!”

No response. The headlights clambered down through the tree, through branches, forks and twigs, until the trunk glowed like a milepost. Klinger lowered his head until just his eyes and the dome of his forehead showed over the pavement. The siren decrescendoed and lowered in pitch. The first truck arrived with a hiss of airbrakes. Klinger ducked.

Doors opened and closed and a radio crackled. In the dark below the opening, now randomly traversed by red and white lights, Klinger made a snap decision. He let his feet drop from the Jeep bumper, duck-walked between it and the sidewalk until the wall was higher than his five foot six, then darted between the Jaguar and the last vehicle north.

As he made his way across the garage he heard a second truck arrive, from the south, followed by an ambulance. Not
far away the distinct siren of a police car lifted into the night. No surprise there; it’s a mere four and a half blocks to central station at Vallejo and Stockton. Then a second siren. And, further away, a third. The intersection of Montgomery and Broadway was turning into a big deal.

He passed a pickup truck whose bed was heaped with trash. He plucked a scrap of dark fabric from it, wiped the blood off the side of his left hand, and buried the rag under a thickness of lawn trimmings.

On the west side of the lower garage, a ramp inclined up to the Broadway level. Klinger took it, smoothing his clothes and hair as he went. Once on top, he wove a path through the thickly parked vehicles until he achieved the attendant’s shack, hard by the street exit. A guy seated on a stool, in darkness illuminated by a small television, looked at him.